The Score: A Parker Novel (3 page)

Wycza said, “That's what?”

But Parker already had it. “You're crazy,” he said.

“Am I?” Edgars was grinning, pleased with himself. “There are three men on duty in the police station at night, two out in the patrol car and the third in the station to take calls. The plant security force at night is also three, one man on each gate and one man in the front office of the main building to take calls. The banks and jewelry stores and so on have no night security of their own at all. The telephone company has three women employees on duty at night, and the door to their building isn't even kept locked. After midnight, the radio station isn't broadcasting. There is one road and one railway line to watch, to keep townspeople in and reinforcements out. Due to the vandalism of juvenile delinquents, there's been a midnight curfew in town for the last four years.”

Wycza was beginning to get it. He said, “Hey, wait a minute, wait a minute.”

Grofield laughed out loud.

Paulus whispered, “Sweet Jesus.”

“We go in at midnight,” Edgars told them. “We pop every safe in town, and we're out by six A.M. Two miles south of where this map leaves off there's the main east—west highway, and from there the whole state network of roads is open to us.”

Parker said, “State police.”

The pointer slapped the map, down near the bottom. “Substation here on 22 A, two miles south of the town limits. State and city are differing political faiths, there's friction. State troopers never patrol north of the city line.”

Parker said, “All-night diner.”

Edgars shook his head. “None. Curfew, remember? There's a Howard Johnson out on the highway; that's where the troopers go.”

Parker shook his head. “Five minutes after we leave, they'll be burning up the phone wires behind us. There'll be a roadblock at the highway before we get to it.”

“We can arrange things to give ourselves more time. Break radio and telephone equipment, wreck a truck or two across the road, tie and gag policemen and telephone operators and the rest. We'll have to figure out where we hide out afterwards, of course. We wouldn't want to be on the road too long.”

Paulus, over on his side of the table, was shaking his head in wonder. “It could be done,” he whispered. “It honest to Christ could be done.”

But Parker wasn't satisfied. The operation broke too many rules. Set up by an amateur. Requiring too many men. Involving going into a box with only one way out. And it was just too big and fantastic an idea to begin with, it was science fiction.

Edgars said, “It's time to talk about money. Payday at the refinery is Friday. Thursday night there's approximately sixty thousand in the refinery safe. The two banks should have between
fifty and seventy-five thousand in cash each. Give them the low figure, that's a hundred thousand from the two banks. Three jewelry stores, cash and gems, among them they ought to be good for another fifty thousand at the very least. The loan company and department store and other stores and commercial operations, maybe fifty thousand more all told. There's a minimum of a quarter million dollars in that town, maybe more. With twenty-five men on equal shares, that's a minimum of ten thousand a man.”

“Ten thousand? That's not much, for the risk.”

“That's a
minimum.
There may be more.”

Paulus said, “Maybe it could be done with less men, Parker.”

“You'd know more about that than I would,” Edgars told him.

Grofield said, musingly, “If it could be done at all, it would be fascinating.”

Wycza said, “I don't like that state police barracks. And I don't like not having any getaway figured out.”

“One thing at a time,” said Paulus. “Why don't we think about manpower first?”

Edgars' face, even in the semidarkness, showed an excitement that didn't go with his ward politician features. “The way I thought of it,” he said, “would be almost like a commando raid. Each of the five of us would captain a group of five men, including himself. Each of our groups would have specific objectives. My group would take out the police station and radio station and plant security men and telephone
company building. Parker's group would go for the refinery safe, with the payroll. Paulus' group would take the Merchants' Bank and Nationwide Finance. Grofield's group would take City Trust and Raymond Jewelers, right next door to it. Wycza's group the other two jewelry stores and the other commercial buildings along Raymond Avenue.”

Parker shook his head. They were now talking about his business, his speciality. Whether he took the job seriously or not, he couldn't avoid thinking about it, and about the best way to handle it.

He said, “You don't want to do it that way. You waste man-power. You have four men stand around with nothing to do but watch a fifth man work on a bank vault. You don't need all those men.”

Edgars watched him. “How, then? How should it be set up?”

Parker got to his feet and walked to the end of the room. He studied the map projected on the screen, and said, “To begin with, you need four men on stationary plant for as long as we're in there. One at the police station, one at the telephone company, one at the factory front office. Those three to handle any phone calls or anything like that. And the fourth man in a parked car down by the town line, so he can warn the rest of us if anybody's coming in. We'd need walkie-talkies for that. They're cheap, in any Army-Navy store.”

“That's four,” said Edgars.

Parker pointed at the map. “Five men hit the police station. One stays. That leaves four to hit the telephone company. One stays. Three to hit the west gate of the plant, take care of the guard, get into the main building without being seen by the guard at the east gate.”

“No trouble,” said Edgars. “The gates are six long blocks apart, and the main building is right near the west gate.”

Parker glanced at him. “Any business at night? Truck deliveries or anything?”

“Not usually.”

“So there's another man on plant. With a guard uniform on, at the east gate. Sign at the west gate, ‘Closed, use other entrance.’ That leaves two. One of them has to stay in the office of the main building, and the other one tackles the safe.”

“Fine!” said Edgars. “That's fine! Just five men!”

“So far. Everything else you want is on Raymond Avenue, right?”

“Right. So's the west gate to the plant, down at the end of Raymond Avenue.”

“I see that. All right, you need four more men, two on each side of the street. One opens the safes, the other one transfers the loot to the cars. We need four cars. One at the town line, for the lookout. One at the plant. Two along Raymond Avenue. Four cars, four walkie-talkies, a lot of guns, ten men.”

Edgars moved closer, and for a few seconds his bulky shoulder cast a black shadow on the screen. He moved back out of
the way and stood gazing at the map. “Ten men,” he said. “I wouldn't have believed it.”

“You need three box men. Paulus is good at that, so you need two more. You seem to know the town, Edgars, so you ought to be the lookout.”

“You're in, Parker?”

Parker looked at the map. “Not yet,” he said. “I want to see a getaway route that makes sense. I don't like the idea of driving four cars out of town past that state police barracks at six o'clock payday morning.”

Wycza said, “I don't like that state police barracks at all.”

Parker went on, “I want to see a hideout we can get to but the law can't. I want to be sure there's no other way to get information out of that town but what we've already covered, and I want to be sure there's nobody else we have to worry about in that town but what we've already covered.”

“We can straighten those points out, Parker,” Edgars assured him.

“Then let's do it.” Parker looked down at the slide projector. “What's the rest of the slides in that box?”

“His trip to Ausable Chasm,” said Grofield.

“Shut up, Grofield.” Parker said it quietly, not bothering to look at him.

Edgars said, “Pictures of the banks, the plant gates, the police station, and everything else.”

“They'll come in handy some other time. What about getaway route? What about hideout? You got a map of the whole state there?”

“No, I don't.”

“You've got to get one. You're from out around there, aren't you?”

“I was.” His voice was bitter.

The personal reasons again. Parker didn't give a damn about them. He said, “You get a state map, a couple of them. A road map and a topographical map. You look at them till you find a spot we can hole up. If we leave there at six we've got maybe an hour before the alarm's out. You find us a place fifty miles away or less, that we can get to without being noticed and without leaving tracks, and that the law wouldn't come in after us.”

Edgars nodded. “All right, I'll do it.”

Wycza said, “What about that goddam trooper barracks? Edgars, ain't there any side road, dirt road, anything at all to take us
around
that barracks?”

“Nothing,” Edgars told him. “Flat dead countryside, that's all.”

Wycza got to his feet and stretched. His knuckles scraped against the ceiling. He said, “I just don't like that barracks there, that's all.”

“Neither do I,” Parker told him. “Edgars, switch off that projector, we don't need that map right now. Paulus, give us some light.”

When they had light, Parker said, “I don't like four cars going
into
town past that state police barracks, and I don't like them coming out again past the barracks.”

Grofield said, “What about holing up inside the town? The old double feint. I've seen you use that a dozen times, Parker.”

“It's no good here,” Parker told him.

Edgars said, “What is it?”

“It works in some jobs, not this one. You do the job, then make like you're going to run for it. You run maybe two blocks, and hole up. They throw out roadblocks all over the state and wait for you to show up. You don't, so they figure you must of holed up in town. They take the roadblocks down and start looking for you in town, and that's when you leave town.”

Edgars laughed. “You're in when they're looking for you out, and out when they're looking for you in.”

“Right.”

Grofield said, “What's wrong with doing it here?”

“Too small a town, number one. Only one road out, number two. They could put up one dinky roadblock and leave it there for thirty years, till we showed our faces.”

Grofield shrugged. “So we have to go past the troopers, that's all.”

Paulus said, “Going in's no problem. We can slip in over a couple days.”

“So half the townspeople can make you in the rogue's gallery. No good, Paulus. We go in the night it happens and go back out the same night.”

“These are details we can work out,” Edgars told them.

“We work them out soon,” Parker said, “or there's no job.”

Edgars said, “Tomorrow morning I'll get the maps. We can meet back here again tomorrow night. Nine o'clock?”

Nine o'clock was all right with everybody. Edgars said, “This thing will work, I know it will. The town's wide open for it, and you people have the knowledge to do it.”

“We'll see,” Parker told him.

They left one at a time. Wycza went first, and Parker second. Parker walked back to the hotel and went up to his room. He lay down on the bed in darkness and stared at the ceiling, thinking about the job.

It was a crazy one. It broke practically every rule there was. But if the remaining loose ends could be tied up, it just might be workable.

A lot depended on the men. Wycza was all right, steady and fast. Grofield acted sometimes like he didn't take anything seriously, but he knew when to cut that out and get down to work. Paulus was a fidgety type, but first-rate on safes and bank vaults.

But what about Edgars? He had some sort of grudge against somebody in that town, and that wasn't good. Also, he was an amateur at this kind of thing. But in some ways he wasn't an amateur at all. The way he'd reacted to the news about Owen, for instance. Sore at first, but after a while catching on, and then not bringing the subject up again. He was a tough man to figure. First he tried to bluff his way, and then he put all his cards on the table, but there was always the impression there were still a few cards left up his sleeve.

It might be a good idea to find out what Edgars' normal
line was. It just might be that his personal reasons were something that would mess up the operation from the start.

There were still too many doubts; Parker wasn't sure yet whether he wanted to be in this one or not. He didn't really need the dough yet, not for living expenses, but his cash reserve was low. The main reason he'd decided to come on up here and look this over was that he'd been getting bored ….

H
e'd been swimming when the call came. Boredom had driven him from the room, and then boredom drove him from the beach. He put his beach robe back on over his trunks, stuck cigarettes and matches in the pocket, and walked through the sand and bodies toward the hotel, which was squatting there like a big white birthday cake.

He was a big man, broad and flat, with the look of a brutal athlete. He had long arms, ending in big flat hands gnarled with veins. His face—it was his second, done by a plastic surgeon—looked strong and self-contained. Women asprawl on the sand in two-piece bathing suits raised their heads to look at him as he went by; he was aware of the looks but didn't respond. It didn't interest him right now.

He knew what the problem was, had known for a couple of weeks now. It had been six months since he'd worked. Inactivity always got to him like this after a while.

He walked on through the sand to the hotel and entered the beach elevator. Two women got on right after him. They were in bathing suits, with towels draped across their shoulders. They were young and good-looking, with the impatient eyes of northern secretaries on vacation. They looked at him and he looked at the elevator boy and said, “Eight.” Then he faced front.

Riding up, he didn't think about the women at all, but about the last job. He and Handy McKay had got the statuette for Bett Harrow's father, and a few thousand extra for themselves. Now Handy was retired again, running a diner in Presque Isle, Maine. Parker wasn't retired, didn't want to be retired. But he didn't have anything lined up either. After that last job, he'd spent a while in Galveston, and then he'd gone to New Orleans for a few weeks, and now here he was in Miami. He'd had one woman in Galveston, a couple in New Orleans, but none here. He didn't have the interest.

He got off at the eighth floor and walked down the wide hallway to his room. The telephone started ringing as he was unlocking the door. He went in, shut the door, went across the room, and picked up the phone.

It was the switchboard downstairs. “A message, Mr. Willis,” she said. His name here was Charles Willis. She said, “A Mr. Sheer tried to reach you from Omaha, Nebraska. He would like you to call him at your convenience.”

“All right. Thank you.”

“Shall I place the call for you, sir?”

“No, I'll call later.”

“Yes, sir.”

He hung up and lit a cigarette and sat down on the bed to think. He knew what the call was all about. It was a job. Whenever anybody wanted to get in touch with him, to offer him a piece of a job, they contacted him through Joe Sheer. Joe Sheer was a retired peterman, an old guy who'd blasted his way into more safes than he could remember and was now living slow and easy in Omaha, with a new face and a fat bank account and a lot of friends like Parker among the boys still working. Joe was the only one who always knew how and where to get in touch with Parker; Parker sent him a postcard every time he moved to a new address. So did half a dozen others; Joe was a good safe middleman and post office.

So it was a job. His instinct was to grab it right away, but he wasn't sure. He had a rule. He never took a job unless he needed it. If you let yourself go, work every chance you got, you just left yourself open for heavy time. Every job carried with it the risk of being grabbed by the law, so the fewer the jobs the less the risk.

He got pencil and paper and worked out his finances. He had seven thousand in the hotel safe here, maybe another ten thousand in bank accounts and hotel safes scattered across the country. The seven thousand was plenty to live on for a while, but ten thousand was too low for a reserve fund. He
could
let it slide a few more months, on what he had, but it might be safer in the long run to stoke up the reserve fund now, when he had the chance.

He was making excuses for himself, and he knew it. But he needed to be working, he needed to have something to think about, even more than he needed to build up his reserve cash supply.

He could look into the job, anyway. It might not be any good. Just about half the jobs he was invited on looked good to him. The rest had something wrong with the setup, or the personnel, or one thing and another, and he stuck around only long enough to hear the story. So there was an even money chance that he wouldn't be taking this job anyway, but at least he'd have something to think about for a couple of days.

He got to his feet and changed from robe and trunks to slacks and sports shirt, and then left the room again. He took one of the front elevators this time, rode down to the lobby, and left the hotel. A call like this one wasn't made through a hotel switchboard.

He crossed the boulevard and took a side street away from the beach. The hotels on the inland side of the boulevard were a little smaller and a little grayer than the beachfront hotels; behind them stretched a declining expanse of tourist courts and efficiency apartments and motels. After a while there were supermarkets and liquor stores and bars.

Parker went into a bar and got five dollars in change from the bartender, then went to the phone booth in back to make his call. When he closed the booth door, a little fan went on over his head, but it didn't do much good. He began to sweat right away.

It took a while to get the call through, and then he had to
pump quarters and dimes into the box before he could talk. He said, “Charles Willis here.”

“Good to hear you, Chuck.” Sheer had an old man's voice, with something cheerful in it. “How's the weather down there?”

“Hot.”

“Still on vacation, eh?”

“I'd go back to work if anything came along.”

“I was talking to a fella in your line the other day. Paulus, you know him?”

“Sure.”

“Him and Wycza and some others, they're opening a branch office in Jersey City. Maybe they could use another field man.”

“The main operation going to be in Jersey City?”

“No, I don't know where the head office is. That's just a branch, to get organized.”

“I might send them a résumé. What's the address?”

“Three nine nine Crescent, four A.”

“Are they open for business yet?”

“You probably ought to call first and check. The number's 837-2598.”

Parker was writing it all down. “I wouldn't call long distance,” he said. “I'd just send them a résumé. What do they pay, do you know?”

“That I don't, Chuck, sorry. Ought to be good wages, though, the way Paulus was talking.”

“Is he the sales manager?”

“No, I don't think so. There's some sort of regional manager setting things up, the way I get it.”

“I might look into it. Thanks for thinking of me.”

“Anytime, Chuck. Send me a bathing beauty.”

Parker left the booth, had a beer to get rid of some change and to cool off a little, and then walked back to the hotel. He phoned down to have his bill made up, made a reservation on a jet flight to Newark, and packed. He left the hotel room, and five hours later he walked into the hotel room in Jersey City. Then he met Edgars and heard the proposition.

Knock over a city. A whole goddam city.

It was so stupid it might even work. But it would have to be planned right. This one would have to be planned right on down to the shoe leather.

If Edgars wouldn't louse it up some way.

If they had every communications outlet in town figured.

If they could work out a sensible getaway route to a reliable hideout.

If they could get the right men.

If they could think of every possibility.

Right now, it was still just an idea, not a job yet. Maybe it never would be a job. He'd sleep on it.